The Most Dangerous Game: Advanced Mantrapping Techniques [Illustrated] 0873643569, 9780873643566

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DANGEROUS

GAME ME ADVANCED ADVANCED MAN MANTRAPPING TECHNIQUES

RAGNAR BENSON PALADIN PRESS BOULDER, COLORADO

The Most Deadly Game Advanced Mantrapping Techniques by Ragnar Benson Copyright © 1986 by Ragnar Benson ISBN 0-87364-356-9 Printed in the United States of America

Published by Paladin Press, a division of Paladin Enterprises, Inc., P.O. Box 1307, Boulder, Colorado 80306, USA.

(303) 443-7250 Direct inquiries and/or orders to the above address. All rights reserved. Except for use in a review, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility for the use or misuse of information contained in this book. Illustrations by Bill Border

CONTENTS Introduction,

.«..

1

PART

I: MANTRAPS

Jamaican Shark Net

...

7

Rock Traps +, 13 Czechoslovakian Tank Breaker Shake Traps: 2... 27

...

19 '

Oregon Helicopter Trap ... 33 Adehan Tank Fall 4... 39 Heavy-Duty Trigger ...~ 43 Costa Rican Bridge Trap ... 47 CON ON DTP German Head Chopper ... 55 Montagnard Crossbow... 59 Trak Wites4.909 South African Wire Whip Trap... Mantrapper’s Checklist ... 73 a ©onNHS PART

II: ILLUSION

AND

14. 5. 16.

Wilderness Traps ... ‘Trap Chicanery ~...Benson’s Leg Breakers

iy.

Flaming Oil Trap.

.

69

HARASSMENT

85 32 ...

DEVICES

93

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PART III: ADDITIONAL MANTRAP 18. Urban Mantraps 107 ...

SCENARIOS

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INTRODUCTION Several compelling reasons exist for writing a second book on the subject of mantrapping. Judging by the number of letters I have received from readers, people are out there putting the mformation I presented in Mantrapping to good use. There is no doubt that survival-oriented paramilitarists are making day-to-day use of the principles and tactics of mantrapping. Good sales of my previous book on the subject in certain countries in the world (Canada and Australia are two examples) are especially surprising since these nations prohibit the sale or advertising of this type of book. It should come as a shock that most supposedly macho paramilitary magazines and papers in the United States won’t carry an ad for Mantrapping, and none of the “blood-and-guts” books are advertised even in the supposedly macho blood-and-guts magazines. Another reason for writing a second volume on mantrapping is that in the intervening years since my first

book on the subject, I have again taken quite a few international

assignments,

mostly

in

rural,

difficult-

to-reach places. In many cases, a war was going on in the place I was working. In that context I saw, or in a few cases even used, some new kinds of mantraps that I knew would be of interest to paramilitarists. Guns are increasingly difficult for the adventurer to carry from country to country. As a matter of fact, in

]

2

THE MOST DANGEROUS

GAME

most places in the world, it’s impossible to take along or otherwise acquire any kind of firearm. Therefore, the only protection a person has who lives out of the economy is to rig some traps. This in a nutshell is why I seem to run into so many different mantraps. I don’t

like it but, in many

cases,

it’s the only damn

protection we have. Lastly, people have written to ask why I didn’t include this mantrap or that mantrap in my first book. They very validly pointed out that the traps they suggested were fairly common. Sometimes the suggestions were good, and I should have included some of these traps in my first book. In other cases, the concepts were more akin to booby traps; the Hungarian Joker is one of these that I have, in fact, included in this book. It is also

important, in my opinion, to cover in this volume more urban traps and traps that will get helicopters or other motorized vehicles. And there were criticisms. A writer from Connecticut, among others, pointed out that I didn’t say enough about being sure the set looked natural after the trap was in. Include a checklist, he said, which I am doing in

this volume. Another writer from Arizona believes I didn’t stress camouflage enough. ‘“‘You didn’t tell us how careful one had to be to hide the trap,”’ he wrote. Perhaps not. In this volume, I am going to remind everyone over and over again that the trapper has to hide the damn trap or it won’t work. A few people have written to remind me that I don’t know the laws of physics. They are right, of course. My formal training in physics came in high school so many years ago that I can’t remember what the teacher or the classroom looked like, much less any “laws” I might have learned. I have, however, actually played around with this stuff a bit. Iam sorry the anchor stakes pulled in some Cases, or the lines weren’t heavy enough and the trap collapsed. One must develop a “‘feel”’ for what will work and which parts of the trap will have to withstand

INTRODUCTION

3

the greatest strain. We’ll need to cover that a bit more in detail in this volume. As with all of my books, I believe the information will be helpful and interesting to those of us around the world who have chosen to lead interesting lives.

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PARTI: MANTRAPS

1. JAMAICAN SHARK NET Apparently this trap, or maybe it should be called a deterrence, is fairly common in the Caribbean. Quite a few people I have talked to know about it. How often such traps are actually used is, however, another question.

I first heard about the Jamaican shark net from one of my sons. At the time he was a member of a team that specialized in rescuing downed aircraft. His group was called in to bring out a Navy Sikorsky HH-3F helicopter that made an emergency down on Mona Island west of the main island of Puerto Rico. The engines on the chopper were both gunny-bagged, according to my son. His team took in tents, tools, and equipment plus two new engines, setting up shop right on the little dirt emergency strip on Mona itself. : The lack of anything except intermittent rainwater keeps the population on Mona down close to the zero mark. It’s a nice enough place but without fresh water and regular service to the main island, Mona is too small and jungly to attract many permanent residents. Mona Island sits right smack in the middle of Mona Passage, one of the principal routes used by the drug runners out of Colombia, and points south. It’s faster to come through the Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba. For several years, though—until the Drug

Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard

7

8

THE MOST DANGEROUS

GAME

got their act together and tightened up operations— it was much safer to come through the Mona Passage. At the time the chopper went down, the Coast Guard had just started to step up its level of patrolling in the area. They used the old Strategic Air Command strip near Aguadilla, which is about twenty-five nautical miles from Mona Island, as their base of operation. As soon as I could work it out, I flew my Rockwell Commander in to see how the team was doing. I landed on the little gravel strip without incident. As I remember, it was

about

3,000

feet long with a slight uphill

bend on the north end. The rescue team had been on site for about twenty days when I got there. It appeared to me that about 98 percent of the work was completed, which my son later confirmed. It would only take a few more hours, he said, to get the chopper ready for flight back to Aguadilla. But the team wasn’t in much of a hurry. Spear fishing along the reefs was excellent, he said, and goat hunting

least that good. That afternoon,

one

on Mona

of the young men

itself was

at

shot a kid

with his .22 pistol, and we roasted it over an open fire for dinner. I had to agree the living was real easy. Along with rum and coconut milk and some small groupers we wrapped in banana leaves, the meal is one I will remember for quite a while. The next morning, we walked down to the shore. Perhaps 1,000 meters up the line my son pointed out the place where team members had run into the wire. It was set in a protected area between a rock wall that formed part of the island itself and some rocky shoals about fifteen meters out in the ocean. Depth at that point was about four meters. The bottom was irregular with lots of cuts and small canyons. Their first encounter with the wire occurred as they worked their way up among the rocks while looking for lobsters. All three team members swam under it without realizing anything was amiss. Since they were all using SCUBA rigs, they were probably in no real danger.

JAMAICAN SHARK NET

For a shark wire to work

best, it must

9

be set in a sheltered cove,

parallel to the ocean floor at a depth of at least two meters.

One of the divers ran into the wire as he swam in close to the rock wall. At first he thought some trash had caught in the slackwater pool which had formed in the lee of the rocks.

Later, when

the team

members

examined the trap, they found that the thin steel mesh wire was anchored on either side to some old 3/4-inch rotten wire rope. It appeared as though the wire may have been changed a time or two, but they were not certain that was the case. The wire, which was six feet below the water surface, extended out about five meters

to the barrier rocks and covered quite a large area. It

10

THE MOST DANGEROUS

GAME

was ideally located in a sheltered spot where the tides and current did not immediately tear it out. Fishermen in Mayaguez later told me the device was known in Spanish as an alamere para tiburon, literally a Jamaican fish or shark wire. Such wires are set out to protect an especially good lobster or reef fishing hole from skin divers. SCUBA divers are not particularly troubled by the wire since they can simply swim under the wire and out the other side, but the wire acts as a

deterrent to skin divers. The device is usually made

of large-mesh

chicken

wire. On the Grand Caicos Island, I was told that some-

times a nylon fish net was used rather than chicken wire because it lasted longer in salt water. Nets there, they said, were set out to keep skin divers from approaching remote airfields under water, as well as to protect fishing areas. I asked about the effectiveness of net versus wire. They told me that wire was better because most skin divers carried knives and could cut through the net. Wires, they said, cut the victim if he tried to get through. This cutting business is, in my opinion, mostly fictional, yet I can visualize situations in which it might be possible to trap skin divers trying to compromise an area in a paramilitary context. It appears that the best plan is to use heavier gauge plastic-coated wire that is stretched parallel to the ocean floor. This means that the wire will slope down under the water and may start as low as two or three meters deep! A diver can unknowingly swim under the wire and not be able to reach the surface for air without experiencing a lot of trauma. By placing the wire net, all but the very determined are discouraged from entering the area. The wire my son encountered covered a fantastic lobster bed from which the team speared a critter that weighed over eleven kilos! Its shell—they are actually crayfish and not traditional lobsters with claws—was big enough to wear over a man’s head like a hat!

@ Cable: 2 meters underwater

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ene

Intermittent line of rocks acts as barrier.

Wire mesh or net parallel to bottom

Cable tied to rock wall holds wire or net.

Ideally, a wire net trap can be placed in the water so that it is sheltered from the tide and currents.

12

THE MOST DANGEROUS

GAME

There are problems, though, with net traps. They are obviously expensive to put out. Not only is there the initial expense for wire, but the wire must certainly be replaced with maddening frequency. If the waves and tide don’t knock the nets out, the salt water will eat the

wire away in very short order. Seaweed washed by the current through the trap will hang on the wire, creating another difficult problem for the trapper. Like all mantraps, the Jamaican Shark Net has its share of problems. That’s why it’s usually easier to set out booby traps. Yet who knows? Someday you may be sitting in a place where one of these devices will work perfectly.

2. ROCK TRAPS One of the traps that generated a lot of interest in my previous mantrapping book was the Sheepeater Rock Fall. It is hard to tell if the interest was directed toward the trap or rather to the Indians themselves! You may recall that the Sheepeaters were a band of Indians who lived high in the northern Rockies in places that other Indians considered inhospitable. They may have possibly been a group of outcasts from other tribes,

but

no

one

knows

for sure

because

the tribe

became extinct by the 1880s. The guess, however, is that they were a widely scattered tribe which possessed limited technology and lived a very precarious existence in places that were so desolate no other Indians ventured there. It seems that the Sheepeaters as a group were unable to compete with other tribes. So as to limit

competition that they knew would always put them in second place, they moved into the high mountains. That’s about all I or anybody else I can find to talk to seems to know about the Sheepeaters. Several people have asked what the Sheepeaters used for lines to trip their traps. Modern mantrappers are

certainly best served by using wire which was, of course, not available to these Indians (who apparently also didn’t have guns or metal knives). I don’t know for sure what kinds of line they had, but several types were available at that time. The Indians could have made line 13

14

THE MOST DANGEROUS

out of skins, braided horse

GAME

and animal hair, intestine,

fibery sisal-like material much like cornstalks, several types of maple branches, and even vines. (Some long vines grow in the mountainous West but, like wild grapevines in the Midwest, they tend to be stiff and clumsy when used as trigger lines.) I have on several occasions tried to use “vines” to set up trap triggers: once in the Philippines in central Mindanao near Marawi City and another time when I was in East Africa. Vines don’t work well at all and, al-

though I have never tried to use them, braided leather rope or gut lines must also be a pain to use. I have nothing but admiration for the Indians who put up with these kinds of materials and, in spite of sun and snow,

made them work.

One of the devices the Sheepeaters used to protect their territory was a rock chute trap. Sometimes the device was a pure trap triggered by intruders, while other times it was a setup triggered by the Indians themselves as they retreated from their enemies. They would position larger rocks in such a way that they were channeled down a trail the enemy would be likely to use to reach the Sheepeaters’ hideout. As with all mantraps, the critical element is the terrain. The trap has to be constructed on a steep path in a place where rocks are common. A reasonably alert person is going to be immediately suspicious if a rock is perched above him someplace along his path. If that’s the only rock for a thousand meters, the trap is then immediately compromised. Using the path as a channel for the falling stone implies more than just counting on the victim to come up the mountain at that place. The idea is to hold the rock in a chute or channel so that its direction of fall will be more predictable. It may come as a shock to flatlanders, but not all mountains have rocks on them that will readily roll downhill. In some cases it takes a bit of luck to get the

Main stone drops when prop

is pulled by the first stone.

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Vi . Vine hangs down trail.

|Worn trail becomes a channel for falling stones. Big rock holds back smaller stones.

fine to second boulder trigger. Notch cut in hill in trail to hide and hold rock.

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